Although they represented a tiny portion of America's medical professionals, these public health activists were able to win widespread coverage from the mainstream news media, with only minor protest from conservative media, which pointed out that more than two-thirds of the letter's signatories were neither medical doctors nor doctors of osteopathic medicine.
This activist-media alliance soon won support from a third group: major celebrities. The countercultural musician Neil Young announced that he would be pulling all his music from the Spotify streaming service in protest of Rogan's presence there. Despite his longtime support for free expression and his own scientific skepticism — he dubbed his 2006 antiwar concerts the "Freedom of Speech Tour," and remains an ardent opponent of the use of GMOs in food — Young effortlessly slotted himself into the new progressive censorship machine. Soon after, singer Joni Mitchell and rock musician Nils Lofgren joined in.
The U.S. government, forbidden by contemporary constitutional law from simply censoring Rogan itself, dispatched Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to reinforce President Joe Biden's message imparted last year that social media platforms are "killing people" by allowing too much freedom of speech about the pandemic, the virus, and the vaccines.
"People have a right to make their own decisions, but they also have a right to accurate information to make that decision with," Murthy told MSNBC. "This is not just about what the government can do," he coyly noted, "this is about companies and individuals recognizing that the only way we get past misinformation is if we are careful about what we say and use the power that we have to limit the spread of misinformation."
Murthy's message reinforced the media outlets that had taken aim at Rogan, inspiring a wave of new reports not only focused on his discussions of COVID but also labeling him problematic in other regards. The Daily Show's Trevor Noah, whose role in this ecosystem is to disguise Democratic Party talking points as humor, criticized a segment in which Rogan and author Jordan Peterson poke fun at the absurdity of modern racial categorization, noting that nobody is actually "white" or "Black." CNN signal boosted Noah's criticism, as did a rangeof otheroutlets. Other activists found old clips of Rogan mentioning (but not using) racial slurs.
Eventually, Spotify got the message. It announced new platform rules that include adding advisories to select content dealing with COVID. It began deleting dozens of older Rogan episodes that contained transgressive content. Its CEO promised to devote $100 million of company money on content from "historically marginalized groups," which in this case is likely to be defined exclusively by progressive activists (don't expect a lot of sponsored podcasts on Asian American opposition to racial preferences in college admissions). In the span of a week, Rogan posted two separate apologies for his past content.
Comment: It actually looks like it was Rogan himself who chose to have the episodes pulled, according to a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to Spotify employees. From RT:
Spotify reportedly paid north of $100 million in 2020 to become the exclusive home for The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, and to license his back catalog. The platform has since pulled more than 70 episodes from that archive, but CEO Daniel Ek claimed in an internal memo that this was done at Rogan's request.The statement was put out several days ago and Rogan has yet to deny it.
"I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer," Ek wrote in the memo, reportedly meant to be internal but leaked to the press over the weekend.
The authors of the open letter that initiated the firestorm, however, are not satisfied. One of them told Rolling Stone that the Spotify advisories will just create a "'false balance' problem. It's designed to look like they're doing something, but they're not doing anything. It's more spectacle than substance."
These activists know how to play the game. If you look back at any of the recent controversies over free speech — from QAnon to COVID to the last two presidential elections — this is how things work when a development or outcome is seen as unfavorable or undesirable by the favored political camp:
First, activists create a panic about misinformation or offensive speech. Second, the social media platforms try to meet them halfway by introducing measures like warning labels. Third, the activists realize they've drawn blood, and continue to push for outright censorship. Finally, the social media platforms give in and remove the offending voice from their platforms altogether.
The institutions successfully driving this push for ideological conformity across American life — progressive nonprofits, large portions of the news media, woke corporations, Democrats in government — can collectively be called the "blue stack," which represents an enforcement mechanism for the ruling ideology to express hegemony over American democracy.
Sometimes the foot soldiers of the blue stack are explicit about their goals. Shortly after conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was banned from Spotify, YouTube, and Facebook in 2018 — an early test case of blue stack power — then-CEO Jack Dorsey noted that the reason he wasn't banned from Twitter was simply that "he hasn't violated our rules." Dorsey suggested instead that it was important for journalists to "document, validate, and refute" false information so "people can form their opinions."
Dorsey, who always had a reputation for being on the more speech-friendly side within his company, was quickly disciplined by the blue stack, as journalists publicly scolded him. "I am not getting paid to clean up your website for you," the Los Angeles Times' Matt Pearce told him in a viral Tweet, playing an unusual but increasingly common role as a reporter who doubles as a censor. Pearce was speaking for the stack: Do the job, Jack. Within weeks, Jones was banned by Twitter. Last July, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was clear when she suggested that individual social media bans should apply across the entire internet. "You shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there," she said, issuing a sort of directive to Silicon Valley.
The blue stack presents America's elite with something they've always craved but has been out of reach in a liberal democracy: the power to swiftly crush ideological opponents by silencing them and destroying their livelihoods. Typically, American cultural, business, and communication systems have been too decentralized and too diffuse to allow one ideological faction to express power in that way. American elites, unlike their Chinese counterparts, have never had the ability to imprison people for wrong-think or derank undesirables in a social credit system.
But the alliance between the media, progressive activists, certain government officials and bureaucrats, technology firms, and other powerful institutions like business and banking now allows them to shape events through what Tablet's Wesley Yang has called the vertical messaging apparatus. When a politically inconvenient story appears at an inopportune time — one about, say, the corruption of the Democratic presidential candidate's son — the blue stack takes unified action to quickly suppress it.
Dozens of former officials from the intelligence community can sign a letter baselessly insinuating that the Hunter Biden story was just Russian disinformation, the mainstream media can publish it, and social media companies friendly to or fearful of the Democratic Party can collude to limit access to the original reporting. "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions," Terrence Samuels, NPR's managing editor for news, said at the time, explaining why the publicly funded network wouldn't cover an incriminating story about the Democratic candidate and his family a few weeks before the election. But who really believes this same sequence of events would have occurred had an identical story been about Donald Trump Jr.'s ties to China? The blue stack is, after all, monochromatic.
As effective as the blue stack is in suppressing stories, it's even more impressive when it creates them. Events that would have been a minor footnote in a local newspaper, if that, are frequently turned into viral moments with which all Americans are called upon to reckon. A relatively brief and nonviolent argument between a Black birdwatcher and a white dog-walker in Central Park becomes national news — including a 2,500-word story that "rattled the nation" in the paper of record — because it serves the blue stack's interests in stoking racial tensions.
The social media giant Facebook went from actively suppressing anti-lockdown protests in the spring of 2020 by taking down their pages for violating pandemic protocols to openly endorsing Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had plenty of cover as public health experts, newly minted members of the stack, themselves urged people to ignore pandemic restrictions and take to the streets. Most major corporations in America followed suit, effectively endorsing a movement that, whatever its promised upsides might have been, divided most Americans. As a crucial member of the blue stack, a media that had once at least aspired to the appearance of impartiality pulled its weight. Reuters, for example, fired one of its data scientists for questioning the data that was used to justify Black Lives Matter's policy platform, such as it was.
Even America's payment processors have joined the ranks of the stack. If you find yourself too far astray from the ideas that the blue stack deems acceptable, GoFundMe might take you off their platform; Paypal might refuse to process your payments. Donors who gave millions of dollars to support a nonviolent protest led by Canadian truckers were surprised to find that GoFundMe abruptly terminated the fundraiser, earning praise from Canadian authorities, who are functionaries in their own closely related blue stack.
When disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo became too much of an embarrassment for the blue stack, ActBlue, the progressive fundraising platform that now exerts a near monopoly over the movement's online donors, kicked him off, crippling his ability to raise money for any future campaign.
To get a sense of what happens when ActBlue removes you from their services, recall that a group of populist activists who had supported Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential bid created the group Brand New Congress to elect populists to both major parties. But they quickly found that ActBlue would not allow them to fundraise if they supported both Democrats and Republicans, making it virtually impossible for them to pursue their mission. Brand New Congress quickly dropped its goal of electing a bipartisan slate of populists and today only endorses Democrats.
And the goal of cutting off heretics from financial resources extends far beyond campaigns. The conservative author Michelle Malkin, who has long rankled the stack with her views on immigration, was told she and her husband can no longer rent community spaces hosted by Airbnb because she spoke at a conference that was hosted by an organization deemed a "hate group" by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Even booking yourself a vacation home now comes with an ideological litmus test.
It's no exaggeration to say that the emergence of this vertically integrated aristocracy threatens the liberal democratic nature of the United States. Institutions like the news media, major corporations, and the government don't naturally align in this way except in the most extreme circumstances when the general public itself may be naturally united, like in the immediate aftermath of an external shock such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
But to the functionaries of the blue stack, every day might as well be 9/11. There's always some form of crisis that demands complete uniformity of thought across all sectors of U.S. society. If anyone steps out of line, they can be disappeared. Even the president of the United States was subject to a virtual ban across almost all sectors of social media. What makes anyone think that they are any less vulnerable than he was?
In its current arrangement, the blue stack is unsustainable. Continuing to marginalize large swaths of the country will result in increased polarization and even greater suspicion between ordinary Americans and elites. The week before Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify, the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of science, released a report warning governments and social media platforms not to rely on censorship to combat scientific information, noting that "removing content may exacerbate feelings of distrust."
Quite right: What the United States needs now more than anything is trust. We must learn to get along with each other, even if not everything everyone says is always 100% scientifically accurate or conforms to rapidly evolving progressive standards of etiquette. Trying to berate and bully ordinary people and the outlets they enjoy into submission will only push them into ever darker modes of thought. For the sake of democracy, we have to find a way to break up the blue stack and reinvigorate pluralism in the United States.
Zaid Jilani is a freelance journalist who has previously worked for UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, The Intercept, and the Center for American Progress. He also writes a newsletter at inquire.substack.com. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia and received his master's from Syracuse University. He is originally from the Atlanta area.
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Edward Curtin
Despite its pedigree as a fundamental element in civilization’s greatest stories, nostalgia has come to be associated with treacly sentimentality, defeatism, and spurious spiritual inclinations.
Homer, Vergil, Dante, the Biblical writers, and their ilk would demur, of course, but they have been dead for a few years, so progress’s mantra urges us to get on with it. This is now.But now is always, and like its twin – exile – nostalgia is perpetual.The aching for “home” – from Greek algos , pain + nostos , homecoming – is not simply a desire for the past, whether in reality or imagination, time or place, but a passionate yearning for the best from the past to be brought into the future.
Nostalgia may be more a long ache of old people, but it is also a feeling that follows everyone along life’s way. Its presence may be shorter in youth, and it may be brief, intermittent, and unrecognized, but it is there. Surely it grows with experience. As everyone knows, a taste, a smell, a sight, a sound, a song – can conjure up a moment’s happiness, a reverie of possibility. Paradise regained, but differently.A yearning recognized, as with seeing for the first time how Van Gogh’s blue paint opens a door to ecstasy or a line of poetry cracks open a space in one’s heart for prospective love. Hope reborn as an aperture to the beyond reimagined and made possible.
There is no need to ever leave where we are to find that we are already no longer there, for living is a perpetual leaving-taking, and the ache of loss is its price.But like all pains, it is one we wish to relieve in the future; and in order to make a future, we must be able to imagine or remember it first. We are all exiled in our own ways. Home was yesterday, and our lost homes lie in our futures, if we hold to the dream of homecoming, whatever that may mean to each person. But it also has a universal meaning, since we dwell on this earth together, our one home for our entire human family.You may think I am engaging in fluff and puff and flimsy imaginings. But no.
All across the world there are hundreds of millions of exiles, forced by wars, power politics, poverty, starvation, destructive capitalism, and modernization’s calamitous consequences to leave their homes and suffer the disorientation of wandering. Emigration, immigration, salvaging bits of the old in the new strange lands – thus is their plight. So much lost and small hopes found in nostalgic remembering. Piecing together the fragments.But in a far less physical sense, the homeless mind is the rule today. There are very few people these days who don’t wish to somehow return to a time when the madness that engulfs us didn’t exist; to escape the whirligig of fragmented consciousness in which the world appears – i.e. is presented by the media – as a pointillistic painting whose dots move so rapidly that a coherent picture is near impossible.
This feeling is widespread. It is not a question of politics. It crisscrosses the world following the hyper-real unreality of the technologies that join us in a state of transcendental homelessness and anxiety. All the propaganda about a “new normal” and a digital disembodied future ring hollow. The Great Reset is the Great Nightmare. Nothing seems normal anymore and the future seems even less so.The world has become Weirdsville. This is something that most people – young and old – feel, even if they can’t articulate it. The feeling that all the news is false and that some massive con game is underway is pandemic.Here is an insignificant bit of nostalgia. I mention it because it points beyond itself, then and now. It has always been nostalgia for the future. I think it is a commonplace experience.
When I was in high school, there was a tiny cheese shop on Lexington Avenue and 85th St. in New York City near the subway that I took to and home from school. It was the size of a walk-in closet. Thousands of cheeses surrounded you when you entered. The smells were overwhelming. I would often stop in there with empty pockets on my way home from school.The proprietor, knowing I was in awe of the thousands of cheeses, would often give me little samples with pieces of crusty French bread. He would regale me with tales of Paris and the histories of the various European cheeses. He would emphasize their livingness, how they breathed.By the door was a large basket filled with long loaves of fragrant French bread flown in every morning from Paris by Air France. These were the days before every supermarket sold knockoff versions of the genuine thing. Each long loaf was in a colorful French tricolored paper bag.Those loaves of bread in the French colors always transported me to Paris, a place I had never been, but whose language I was studying. Then, and for years afterwards, I was nostalgic for a Paris that was not yet part of my physical experience. How could this be? I asked myself.One day I realized that I was not nostalgic for Paris or the cheese shop, nor for the cheese or the bread, which I had tasted many times, but for the paper bags the bread came in.
Why?
This question perplexed me until I realized my notion of nostalgia was wrong. For those bags had always represented the future for me, the birds of flight a sign of freedom beckoning as my youthful world expanded. My nostalgia for the Air France bags was a way to go back to go forward, not to wallow in sentimentality and the “good old days,” but to read the entrails for their prophetic message: the small-life world is limiting – expand your horizons.It was not a question of jumping on a plane and going somewhere different, although that in time would also be good. It was not an invitation to revisit that cheese shop, as if that were possible, for the store was long gone and in any case it would not mean the same thing. It was not a desire to become a teenager again. You cannot repeat an experience, despite F. Scott Fitzgerald writing: “You can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can.”
The past in that sense is quicksand, a death wish. For many people (and this is the prevalent understanding of nostalgia as an exclusively negative way of thinking), embittered nostalgia is their way of denying the present and the future, often by the fictitious creation of “the good old days” when everything was supposedly so much better.But nostalgia can also be an impetus to create a better future, a reminder that good aspects of what has been lost need to be regained to change the course of the present’s future trajectory.Today most people are bamboozled by world events, as an idiot wind blows through the putrescent words of the media sycophants who churn out their endlessly deceptive and confusing propaganda on behalf of their elite masters. Given a few minutes peace of mind to analyze this drivel – a tranquility destroyed by the electronic frenzy – it becomes apparent that their fear, anxiety, and contradictory reports are intentional, part of a strategy to pound down the public into drooling, quaking morons.But many people in their better moments do recall times when they experienced glimpses of a better life, transitory as those experiences might have been. Moments when they felt more at home in their skin in a world where they belonged and they could make better sense of the news they received. Not lost and wandering and constantly fearfully agitated by a future seemingly chaotic, leading to dusty death in a story told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.I suggest that those nostalgic moments revolve around the changing nature of our experience of space and time.
There was a time when time was time and space and speed had some human meaning, for people lived within the limits of the natural world of which they were a part.As I wrote once before:
In former days you could cross over to other people’s lives and come back with a different perspective, knowing what was obvious was true and that to exist meant to be composed of flesh and blood like all the others in different places and to be bound by the natural cycles of life and death, spring and fall, summer and winter. There were limits then, on the land, water, and even in the sky, where space too had dimensions and the stars and planets weren’t imaginary landing strips for mad scientists and their partners in celluloid fantasies.In that rapidly disappearing world where people felt situated in space and time, life was not yet a holographic spectacle of repetitive images and words, a pseudo-world of shadowy figures engaging in pseudo-debates on electronic screens with people traveling from one place to another only to find that they never left home. When the mind is homeless and the grey magic of digital propaganda is its element, life becomes a vast circinate wandering to nowhere.The experience of traveling thousands of miles only to see the same chain of stores lining the same roads in the same towns across a country where the same people live with their same machines and same thoughts in their same lives in their same clothes.A mass society of mass minds in the hive created by cell phones and measured in nanoseconds where the choices are the freedom to choose what is always the same within a cage of categories meant to render all reality a ‘mediated reality.’
Nostalgia is always about time and space. In that sense, it is equivalent to all human experience that also takes place within these dimensions. And when technology has radically disrupted our human sense of limits in their regard, it becomes harder and harder to feel at home, to dwell enough to grasp what is happening in the world.I believe that many people feel nostalgic for slower and more silent days when they could hear themselves think a bit. When the sense of always being on the go and lacking time predominates as it does today, thinking becomes very difficult. To think, one must dethrone King Rush and silence Queen Noise, the two conditions that the speed and noise of digital technology render impossible.Tranquilized by the beeping trivia pouring out of the omnipresent electronic gadgets, the very devices being used by the elites to control the masses, a profound grasp of the source of one’s disquietude is impossible.
The world becomes impossible to read. The sense of always being away, ungrounded, and mentally homeless in a cacophonous madhouse becomes the norm. One feels sick in heart and mind.Most people sense this, and whether they think of it as nostalgia or not, I believe they feel that something important is missing and that they are wandering like rolling stones, as Dylan voiced it so poetically, with no direction home.How does it feel? It feels lousy.So it’s not a question of returning to “the good old days.” The future beckons. But if we don’t find a way to rediscover those essential human needs of slowness and silence, to name but two, I am afraid we will find ourselves speeding along into an inferno of our own making, where it’s noisy as hell and not fit for human habitation
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Not remembering Bloody Sunday , albeit an event of the deep North, among distant people shrouded in the mist of the remote Atlantic (you have no idea how much they resemble us, in fact they came from the South), it is like not remembering Bava Beccaris who shoots the hungry on the orders of the king , or Mussolini and Petacci hanging by the feet, or Pope Pius IX, detritus of the Council of Trent, expelled by the patriots of the Roman Republic, or what they have inflicted on us in terms of human, social, cultural, political death, their court of bought and sold.
I believe that whoever happened on those occasions, each epochal, suffered an unforgettable thrill. He has perceived that something has happened that changes the paradigm, changes him, changes the things of the world.
I had already been in turmoil, sent to the terrible 6 Day War in Palestine, villages set on fire, people bombed, clashes between shooters.
And then also '68 -'77, the endless blows of the cops to smash skulls and, in the end, to shoot us. But on all these occasions there was a minimum of balance, however unbalanced, a confrontation between the warring parties. Opposite Israel were the Arab armies. In the years of the revolution, unlike the do-gooders of today, we claimed the right to defend ourselves. And they were sticks, Molotov cocktails, stones. Today we have the revolutionaries of the most vital NO of all the NO ever uttered.
Here, in Northern Ireland, a people have been fighting for justice and freedom for three hundred years, let's face it, damn it, for the nation. On the one hand, the omnipotent monster, overarmed, armored, blind to humanity, with a compulsive obsession with wealth and power, whatever it costs to others. On the other hand, real human beings, helpless, naked, innocent. In the night of dogmas, secular or religious, of millennial deceptions, the light came on. And I have seen it, Power, in its Western, European, civil version. Already warmonger, former colonialist, already vampire over proletarians, but never like this at his home, before my eyes.
To His Majesty's First Paratroop Battalion, sent to the land of the diehards, deprived and righteous, to crush them like insects, and to those insects, my friends from before and forever, even when dead, I owe a leap of conscience and a direction of life that otherwise, perhaps I would never have accomplished. This is why Ireland became my first "second home".
If it weren't too complicated, I'd like to be buried in Derry next to them. Next to Martin McGuinness , a fighter who saved me from the order to shoot me on sight of the paràs, respectful of the freedom of the press as much as of the life of those who claim it, as well as of those to whom it is indispensable. And that he took me, on a starless night, where I could discharge my debt to the righteous, the innocent, the humans.
With the truth.
Also, fwiw, thanks for the link to the Asha Logos channel. I'm working my way through the Subverted history series--started with part 3, couldn't find part 1. This is all new info, though the idea of them saying Troy never existed is something I've heard of before--I didn't know enough to know how to make sense of it.